Thursday, May 09, 2019

"Lost German girl" didn't deserve better

On the contrary...

74 years ago, Prague was liberated by the Red Army. The Vlasov Army – Soviet soldiers who were captured and forced to fight along with the Germans – were actually critical for the liberation of Prague on May 9th. Note that the Prague Operation occurred one day after the German surrender – Bohemia was both the place where the Second World War "became unavoidable" in the first place as well as the last place where it ended.

In recent years, almost certainly because of the EU pressure, I perceive self-evident efforts to apologize Germans and the role they have played in the Second World War; and efforts to hide or understate the role of Russians in ending the war. I think it's obvious that the EU folks realize the similarities between the EU and the Third Reich – and the similar status of Germany in both – so they don't want to harm the image of "something similar to the EU" too much. I have a big problem with that.

"Lost German Girl", a beaten woman filmed on a country road near the Czech border during the surrender of Wehrmacht troops. Her identity is still unknown.

When I searched for "Czech" on Twitter, the tweet above was the first one I got. A frustrated yet attractive "Aryan" girl with a black eye was probably badly treated. It's assumed that she had been previously raped by Czechs – probably Czech men. ;-) Everyone should be compassionate and angry about the Czechs – it's so bad what they did to her. She's so innocent.

And no one will ever learn about the fate of this "Lost German Girl" and her fate, the readers were told. It's so sad and they must have killed her, they were preprogrammed to say by themselves.

The only problem is that every single statement is untrue – they are just propaganda stuff that someone made up. First, is she a Lost German Girl? Not at all. She was neither lost, nor German, nor a girl. The footing was created on May 8th, 1945 by Oren William Haglund, captain in army air forces (California, 11/23/1905-09/15/1972, his grave at Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery; he was married to Priscilla Lane for one day) and it was called "the SS girl" by the American creator. If you look closely, the outfit isn't really civilian. If you were an expert like your humble correspondent, you could immediately say that her pants were statutory pants called Keilhosen. The "girl" was in NSDAP structures, in the SS, and more. We will get to it soon.

First, Haglund was both a coach in self-defense in the U.S. army as well as a wannabe movie director who has collaborated e.g. with Frank Capra or Clark Gable – the latter was a favorite star of Adolf Hitler, by the way. You may see that he had a pretty good camera. Color film has been around from the 19th century but this USAAF color footage looks really modern.

She wasn't a lost German girl. First, she wasn't lost because she knew very well what she was doing and where she was. She was fleeing the zone liberated by the Soviets, she was walking towards Pilsen that she knew was liberated by the Americans two days earlier (she didn't know that Germany surrendered on that very day, May 8th, yet), and the footage took place a few miles from the demarcation line. The demarcation line gave some Western 10% of Czechoslovakia to the Western allies, the rest was liberated by the Red Army. Pilsen was on the U.S. side but the line went through the Eastern suburbs of Rokycany, a smaller town 10 miles East of Pilsen.

The footage was taken on the old road between Prague and Pilsen in Ejpovice, see Google maps or this street view for the approximate location. I know this road very well, it was the main route for cars between Pilsen and Prague. For years, we've been using the new D5 superhighway instead. But this road is still important enough. You may see a verge post saying "78" in the video – it means that Ejpovice was 78 kilometers away from Prague. The new railroad tunnel – longest in Czechia – that shortens the train trips between Pilsen and Prague by 15 minutes is named after Ejpovice.

OK, she wasn't lost. She just went to the U.S. zone to get a better treatment than the Soviet one and be sure that she got a better treatment. Second, she wasn't really German. She was born on February 3rd, 1921, in Kollerschlag, Austria (2 miles from Germany, 10 miles from Czechia). So she was an Austrian woman – baptized as Roman Catholic. Third, she wasn't really a girl, she was 24 years old as you know if you can subtract. So "the Lost German girl" is a triple lie.

Finally, I can also tell you that it's a lie that we don't know who she was. She was Lore Bauer – sometimes misspelled as Lara Bauer. Lore is a completely normal German and Austrian first name. You may even find a woman of the same name, Lore Bauer, who was Jewish and murdered during the Holocaust.

Was she an SS girl? You bet. Finally, I can unmask the best source of information about her that I have found. She has been a Helferin, a female assistant to the Luftwaffe, the Nazi Air Force. She was a proud member of the Nazi BDM (in 1931-1938, her youth photo), the League of German Girls. She was transferred to an anti-aircraft warfare training center at Rendsburg, near Kiel. She learned to use high-tech devices to detect the enemy airplanes. In early 1945, it was finally time for her to get a job, and she was assigned to the new SS Flak Abteilung Alarm Prag. At the end, the technological sophistication of that facility was at the very top and as an SS professional, she was removing all sorts of anti-Nazi weapons.

If you click at the link in the previous two paragraphs, you will learn details about every hour of that day in the footage, May 8th, 1945, and other things. She flirted with the U.S. soldiers. She got a penny from a U.S. soldier. That penny was later transferred to her granddaughter Emi, who was named to Lore's daughter Ula (*1962) and named after Lore's fellow female warrior (Emmi Hüller) who didn't survive the "Czech Hell". The conversations included "Yeah, Hollywood, Clark Gable" and "now come to me, don't be afraid, baby, you SS daughter of a bitch". ;-) She did fine, she worked for Pan Am Airlines between 1965 and 1985, and lived up to October 30th, 1994 (73 years of age). So much for her being completely unknown.

25-minute-long Haglund color video from the liberation of Western Bohemia. People welcome the U.S. troops, apparently unaware of the Stalinist future that was awaiting them. Lore Bauer is seen around 17:40 in the longer video above. She reappears a minute later, with some food. You may see that lots of German men have experienced worse things.

We were told that she was an innocent German girl beaten by the evil Czechs. In reality, she was a highly trained and loyal Austrian Nazi and SS warrior removing airplanes who was certainly extraordinarily compensated for that job, too: she has embraced lots of duties that used to belong to German military men who had to leave for the Western Front. People like her deserved a much bigger punishment than a few bruises. It was unavoidably and macroscopically fair that thousands of such Germans and Austrians were killed before they escaped and it was fair and a good idea that most of the Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia.

Someone may be compassionate about a May 8th, 1945 video that was taken from the context but if someone really doesn't have the instinct to learn about the details and the events that had led to the footage, he is an unfair brainwashed sheep. Germany has done a lot of evil during the war – much more than one man or several men could have done. A huge fraction of the Germans (and Austrians) were guilty and the "presumption of innocence" was bound to be wrong in many cases.

P.S.: The whole Lore Bauer story may be good fiction that someone made up. But even if it is the case, this fiction is representative of what was happening. There were real women working for SS, Wehrmacht etc., and they were trying to escape Czechia and other occupied territory when the war was over 74 years ago. SS Flak Abteilung Alarm Prag was real and German women were really serving there under Ruth Windisch. Most Germans on the Protectorate territory had rather problematic, "muscular" jobs. Haglund and pals probably had a reason to call her "an SS girl". Such a woman probably deserved to be treated as a German warrior. And if you want to give an exception to her, it's probably because you have a crush on her. Even if it were a fair reason for a pardon, which it's not, don't forget she's either dead or about 100 years old now.

P.S. Concerning the Czech history, divisive politics, and memories from the Pilsner Region, I experienced a shockingly unlikely event in the afternoon. I was responding to a hardcore progressive, with a degree from UC Berkeley, on Quora. Her name was Kate Renard and she (?) had some Czech (or, more precisely, hateful anti-Czech) comments on Quora. Otherwise a typical 100% ideological opponent. That would be nothing special – there may be a billion of such people. What was shocking was the following comment:

Very long time ago, two kindergarten friends used to climb on tree stumps in Spitalsky les, and sing Jozin z Bazin in front of the whole class. I still have fond memories of that. It’s a small world.

Tbh, I hardly ever go back anymore. No relatives left in Plzen and I’ve been gone for almost 30 years.

Holy crap. Jožin z bažin was my #1 favorite song when I was in the kindergarten – I still made quite a career with it as a third-grader. ;-) OK, you could still learn this fact from my blog or YouTube channel. Ours was the kindergarten in the street "Towards the Hospital Forest" (Ke Špitálskému lesu). This is already tough and I have never clearly written it on the Internet, I think (the mathematics-focused elementary school I later attended is just 100 meters away which is a complete coincidence, like my current home another 200 meters away). And I was among those who loved to climb on tree stumps in the nearby Hospital Forest – an impossible factoid to Google, I think. The number of people in the world who may remember this thing today must be below 5... and the number of those who are in the U.S. must be at most one. Well, it is apparently equal to one.

This tree with two trunks could have been my favorite "magical tree" to sit on about 40 years ago. I was persuading others (and myself?) that by sitting in this saddle, I had magical powers. Now the saddle looks much lower than I remembered it but maybe I was shorter in the kindergarten age. Have I posted it before? I am not sure it's the right tree from the Hospital Forest but it might be and in that case, I only rediscovered it in late 2017, after several decades of failed attempts to search. ;-)

I can't recall the name of the friend. I can only remember Věra Balousová, a classmate at ages 10-18, and Marek Žižkovský, whom I played with while my mother worked in the nearby library. Kate? I am promised to learn the Czech name via Facebook. Update: It was A. K*ová. I remember the last name – her grandmother Jarmila K*ová worked with my mother in the nearby public library! Doubts about the authenticity of the memories were eliminated.

(Elsewhere, she could also recall I hated the meat that they served us at that age, and as a hamster, a nickname of mine at home, I stored it in my cheeks in order to spit it out somewhere LOL. I must have embraced meat at age of 7-8 or so. My vegan childhood is something I remember very well but it's hard to identify myself with myself now LOL.)